Section Head Election 2016 - Candidate statements

Audience Section

The IAMCR Audience Section will run partial elections for a co-vice chair position during its business meeting in Leicester, to be held on Friday July 29, 16:00-17:30 (Room G85 Geology Teaching Area, at the Bennett Building).

Our good friend Toshie Takahashi (Waseda University, Japan) has decided to step down after four years working hard in our section. We would like to publicly express our gratitude to her positive attitude and we are sure that she will keep on contributing to our section in the future.

The current chair (Peter Lunt, University of Leicester, United Kingdom) and one co-vice chair (Miguel Vicente, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain) will stay on their positions until the 2017 IAMCR Conference in Cartagena (Colombia), as they were elected four years before, in Dublin 2013.

We hereby call for candidacies for a co-Vice Chair position. Please send us your statement (500 words at the most) so as to respect IAMCR rules to the section Chair Peter Lunt <pl108[at]le.ac.uk> with a copy to IAMCR General Secretary Maria Michalis <M.Michalis[at]westminster.ac.uk> and to the IAMCR secretariat <membership[at]iamc.org> by July 13, 2016. You will find the election rules at: http://iamcr.org/governance/swg-rules

Candidates and statements

For Vice-chair:

• Asta Zelenkauskaite, Drexel University, USA

Statements

Asta Zelenkauskaite, Drexel University, USA

I have joined Audience division three years ago –in 2012 in Hyderabad, India. Since then I felt that it has become my natural academic home. My work centers on the overall trends and emergent practices of audiences, users, and participants who are part of mass and social media. The contexts that I am working in are based on the premise of audience autonomy in media contexts that are two-way by design.

I am Assistant Professor of communication at Drexel University. I have completed my doctoral degree at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA working on the intersection between communication, information science, and linguistics. In addition to the USA academic contexts and Lithuania, where I completed my undergraduate studies, I have spent extended periods of time working in other European contexts and media systems. In Italian research contexts, for a year and a half I have been a research fellow Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, working on user participation in Wikipedia. I had a summer internship at Cattolica University, Milan, working on interactive TV project. I have spent a year at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa and Zagreb University, Croatia as an exchange student-scholar.

My work comprises cross-cultural and approaches to audience analysis by considering sociotechnical aspects of media. Methodologically, I have used both – quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze audience interaction. I have embraced a holistic approach to audience analysis by including organizational practices of media production and its relationship to the audience engagement (or lack of it).

I hope as a vice co-chair to contribute to the section’s leadership from three specific aspects that describe my previous experiences: international vision to audience research, cross-cultural analysis, and sociotechnical approaches to audience analysis. I hope that my previous work can contribute to the continuously growing Audience research community with diverse research approaches methodologically and theoretically.